Most cable television vendors provide subscribing customers a predetermined number of viewing channels for a basic monthly fee. Such vendors typically also offer customers the opportunity to subscribe to and receive one or more premium channels of movie, sports, and entertainment selections for an additional monthly fee. This additional monthly fee is commonly based on the number of premium channels subscribed to by the customer. Many times the same program selections are transmitted on different premium channels, but at different times of the day. Thus, by subscribing to a greater number of premium channels, the customer has greater viewing time flexibility.
Cable TV vendors utilizing addressable converter/decoders at the customer's television also offer customers special program selections on a pay per view basis. These special program selections commonly involve a recent movie release or a live concert or sporting event for which the customer pays an extra individual charge to receive each selection. A customer desiring to receive a special program selection telephones the cable TV vendor to order the desired selection. The vendor takes the order, charges the customer a fee for the selection, and addresses the customer's converter/decoder to enable the customer to receive the selection at a designated viewing time. Vendors can manually take customer telephone orders or utilize an automatic pay per view (PPV) order taking arrangement.
In one prior art automatic PPV order taking arrangement, disclosed in Cable and Telcos: From Confrontation to Derente, Report No. 83-1, The Yankee Group, Boston, Mass., June, 1983, pages 163-167, a "black box" is connected to an automatic number identification (ANI) type trunk at a telecommunications switching system office to receive the order from the customer and the identity of the requesting customer line from the office ANI system. The "black box" sends the customer order and the identification of the requesting customer line to the vendor's data processing equipment over a dedicated data channel.
It is anticipated that 75% of the PPV order requests are received in the last half hour before a scheduled event starts. Manual order taking is too slow and would be very expensive, if not impossible, to receive and process a large number of order requests in this peak demand period. The automatic "black box" is much faster than the manual order-taking, but has several drawbacks. First, the telephone company or vendor must purchase and maintain a sufficient number of complicated "black boxes" along with one or more dedicated data channels to handle peak demands. Second, the cable vendor must pay for the plurality of long-distance ANI type trunks connected to the "black boxes".